Debuting this Friday, at Baccara in Phnom Penh, is LoveMe2Time: A Doors Experience, a labour of love featuring some of Phnom Penh’s finest musicians with a brand new singer, Daniel Gillard, who’s been around some, it turns out. LengPleng sat down with Daniel to discuss music, the Doors, and a particularly interesting Cambodia origin story.
LP: You’re appearing in a band for the first time but you do have some experience in music.
Daniel: My father was an organist. We lived in the north west of England, where he was working in a seaside town called Blackpool, playing in hotels and on the Central Pier. He would take me along and I would sing old English folk songs and music hall numbers, The Blackpool Belle, Underneath the Arches, stuff like that. And we would pass his hat around the audience of old retired couples, and the wife would lean in to the husband and say, come on, Norman, throw in a pound, the boy’s earned it. What a delightful voice he has, the voice of an angel! So I did that for quite a few years. When my father passed I was 11, and he left behind a really big twin-deck Technics organ, and I learned to play from a good friend of his who was a music teacher. At 16 I had some paying gigs in a workingmen’s club in my home town Bolton. My last paycheck, all of about $25 converted, was paid to me on the 2nd of October 1996. And my first paying gig in exactly 30 years will be this Friday on 2nd of October 2026 at Baccara Bar. The universe has a way of laughing at me; this is one of the nicer ways.
Then I managed an independent nightclub in Manchester, Antwerp Mansion, a great home for students, creatives, hippies, oddballs. I had the fun job of managing the club, including security, dealing with the police, and community relations. At the time I was serving as a Councillor with Manchester City Council. So by night I was managing Antwerp Mansion and by day I was on the Licencing Committee and the Neighbourhoods Committee, which was a bit of a conflict of interest. Manchester’s that kind of town.
LP: And I understand you worked with some notable names during that time.
Daniel: We twice had the pleasure of hosting the Wu Tang Clan – not all of them at once, because it’s a huge entourage, but we even had Idris Elba joining the band. A lot of fun memories with them. Absolute gentlemen. The only request they had of me was to stand close to them, because they wanted to spend an hour before they went on stage wandering the club and talking to fans.
We also had DJ Craig Charles, who agreed to play for peanuts, because he had promised his daughter that if she passed her A levels with straight As he would play any nightclub in Britain of her choosing. She said Antwerp Mansion; he said something like: are you sure? Another absolute gent. I’d met him 20 years earlier when I was working in a hotel that was right around the corner from where they were filming Coronation Street, and he was on the show at the time. He remembered me 20 years later, so I guess I really do have a face for radio. It was a hell of a set, and it was so hot in there I was bringing towels from my apartment onto the stage to soak up the sweat. He took me out for a curry afterwards on the Manchester Curry Mile.
We also hosted the first modern psychedelia festival, Cosmosis, headlined by the Warlocks, strongly connected with the Dandy Warhols. We always liked booking bands and DJs who were different, off the beaten track.
LP: Tell us about the Doors connection.
Daniel: I met them in Paris back in 2003, when I went over for a Jim Morrison’s birthday gig on 8 December. I went to Pere Lachaise Cemetary to pay my respects, with my mum and some friends, and someone said: hang around for 20 minutes, the Doors are on their way, with Ian Astbury from The Cult who was touring with them as D21C, Doors of the 21st Century. I’d already seen them that year in New York and New Jersey – I’m such a Doors nut I flew over to see them. And they had heard a rumour that some mad Englishman had flown across the Atlantic to watch them, and right next to Jim’s grave Ian Astbury walked up and said: are you Daniel from Bolton? So we’re all standing around chatting and Ray Manzarek, an old school American gentleman, is flirting with my mum. Another organist, Mum! Astbury says come to this address in Bastille at midnight and use my name – a secret show not for the public. A doorman walks me in and says Mr Manzarek has asked if you could watch the show with his wife, Dorothy Fujikawa, she’s quite shy. That was an incredible time. We sat around with the band afterwards and I chatted with Robby Krieger who had a lovely t-shirt on that said Happy Birthday Jim, We Miss You. I thought in the middle of all the celebrity, the legend, the myth, here’s two guys, Ray and Robby, mourning their friend. Being an organist Ray was my all-time musical hero. The next day was the proper show at Le Zenith, and four days later I saw them at Wembley Stadium where the crowd almost rioted. Ask me to tell that story!
LP: Back to the present, what should we be expecting from LoveMe2Time: A Doors Experience in Phnom Penh?
Daniel: Don’t expect a singer with a wig spitting out I Am The Lizard King! I could never disrespect him like that. I don’t look like Jim, my voice isn’t a facsimile of Jim, and somehow I’ve gone from being a keyboard-loving guy to fronting this project. As for the rest of the band, Sal DiGaetano on drums, his personality is not unlike John Densmore – he’s intense, he’s passionate, an incredible drummer. No bullshit. I like that I can talk to him about the mechanics of songs, and he’s teaching me a lot. Then Greg Beshers on guitar, he’s got Robby’s joyful, playful smile, and really enjoys it. He’s got the bottleneck sound down gorgeous, and ways of interpreting Robby’s work that sounds so natural. Robby’s still on YouTube making videos about how to play the songs, saying “I don’t remember how I did this.” Ray was the leader of the band really, who handled the business side. By contrast our keyboard player Felix McFadden is a really chilled out individual, doesn’t like to be the centre of attention, but does a great job with the songs. I’ve only ever seen a keyboard player as good as him twice, and one was Ray Manzarek, and the other, out of loyalty, was my father.
Daniel (photo supplied); Sal
Greg; Felix – note in this band Felix is covering the bass parts with his left hand, as in the original Doors line-up
LP: The missing piece seems to be how you got to Cambodia.
Daniel: In 2015 I needed a holiday. Some friends had mentioned Southeast Asia and I thought I’d take a look. I went with a couple of mates on the usual circuit through Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, but something attached itself to me emotionally in Cambodia, and six months later I was back here for another month on my own. I was encouraged to visit Otres Beach, so I did and loved it.
Before I travelled I’d heard of a band called the Cambodian Space Project, and by sheer happy coincidence they were playing in Phnom Penh during my stay. I contacted their Facebook page and they put my name on the door for a gig at Exchange on St 47 – when I got there I was directed to the VIP area where I met Kak Channthy and Julien Poulson the rest of the band, and a Detroit producer they’d recently worked with, Jim Diamond. It turned out Jim had worked with my father in the 1970s. They really did treat me like a VIP, giving me Mekong whisky and saying we can’t believe you came all the way from the UK to see us – I didn’t have the heart to say it was pure coincidence.
And another interesting coincidence: Friday’s gig is at Baccara, the first live music event there, a bar in a building where Channthy and Julien once lived.
On this second trip I got curious about how I could stay in Cambodia for longer, and one night at a bar in Golden Soriya Mall I asked the owner, a kind Yorkshireman, for advice, and he introduced me to a table of four teachers who told me all about visas, immigration, TESOL, all of that. So I did what I needed to do and was back in Phnom Penh by the end of the year, giving up a promising career in politics, thinking I’d do 12 months – and that was ten years ago. When I went back to the Yorkshireman’s bar and found out he died a month before, so I never got to thank him properly.
You can experience LoveMe2Time: A Doors Experience, on Friday night at Baccara in Phnom Penh.
One Reply to “Daniel from Bolton: here comes LoveMe2Time: A Doors Experience”
Comments are closed.